The Lives of Others - (Das Leben der Anderen): Microphone? What microphone?

Ulrich Muehe RIP

(the guy who played Wiesler)

"a bit schmaltzy," you bet.

If only more playwrights and actresses had introduced Stasi loners to Brecht, the Wall woulda been down in 1970.

I thought the movie was schmaltzy but still surprisingly effective, this mostly due to the central performance. Liked it much better than the highly-regarded domestic (American) melodramas I've seen recently: Mystic River blah blah.

I don't buy either of these absolutist, omniscient critiques, though:

the Stasi officer Wiesler helping Dreymann is such utter nonsense that it ruins the whole movie. It would never happen that some one with over 20 years of continuous indoctrination by the Stasi would help a mortal enemy of the State

-- Tracer

(Imagining that Weixler could exist) betrays ... a misunderstanding of the nature of totalitarianism in general, and the Stasi specifically. No Stasi agent would have been able to keep a secret like that, because everything was rigorously cross-checked and verified. No Stasi agent would have been on control of an entire investigation, from surveillance to interrogation, the way Weisler was.

-- Alfred

The world isn't sufficiently well-regulated to allow that kind of absolute & total certainty. Not even the world of the Stasi. It's always at least possible that human decision-making and/or fallibility could alter the program. There's always a corner here or there where something happens differently, for some unforseen reason. And it's always possible that a seemingly well-indoctrinated man might experience a change of heart even without the agency of "a death, an assault, an an acid trip."

But, yeah, the ending was kinda corny.

it's a total melodrama. nothing wrong with that.

and the criticism that this could never happen is just silly. no one ever defected? no one ever passed secrets to the americans? give me 1 break. or in other words, what contenderizer said.

i mean if you're going to deny even the remotest possibility of change in a human being i don't really see how you can buy any sort of drama.

xp: A totally unpersuasive one. Hollywood remake coming soon! really!

If you'd like to see the lead actress in a good, offbeat thriller: Summer '04

Oh yeah.

how are they gonna do a h'wood remake??

the lives of other others

takes place under the shadow of the wall between virginia and west virginia

lol at early "Spacey" posts, he can play the lead. I think Sydney Pollack bought the rights.

(tho may not live to make it)

it's always possible that a seemingly well-indoctrinated man might experience a change of heart even without the agency of "a death, an assault, an an acid trip."

Not this particular man in this film.

http://www.cinematical.com/2007/03/01/weinsteins-to-remake-the-lives-of-others/

what does that mean? is he like your BFF or something? xp

WORKS OF DRAMA IN NOT ENTIRELY REALISTIC SHOCKER.

critics using generalizations to explain reactions shockah

like you're not generalizing!

The problem is it's sledgehammer-obvious. "You'll be steaming open envelopes..." CUT TO STEAMING OPEN ENVELOPES.

oh wait. i misread that. xp

morbs that gag worked because the kid who told a risky joke years ago is sitting there with him

Who was this Stasi and what did it want?

gff, I recognized the 'joke' and didn't laugh

well it wasn't supposed to be funny, so kudos

I see, it was a GAG (yr word) that wasn't sposed to be funny. I wasn't even bringing up the shot of the other character.

oh man u got me there!!

You really are dependably wrong about everything.

I think Alec Baldwin should play Spacey's Stasi boss in the remake. It would be a Glengarry Glen Ross reunion: "A.B.B., gentlemen, spells Always Be Bugging!"

I'm not saying I entirely bought the shift in Weisler's character, just that it didn't seem totally OMGWTF ridiculous to me. I don't see how my response to this character is any less "correct" than anyone else's, but I'm willing to listen. As I see it, what we're talking about here is more personal than political.

Always

Be

Bugging
http://www.pauldavidson.net/wp-content/themes/wfme/images/entries/alecbaldwin_01.jpg

i was a little disappointed that wiesler didn't turn out to be a better writer than dreyman. there was a little window opened where he's creating scenes of his "writing sessions" on the Lenin play out of whole cloth, i really wanted his superiors to want line-by-line info on this fake play, meaning he has to be up all night writing it. that would have been great.

Cyrano de Stasiac. Cries of "Author! Author!" at the debut, Wiesler shockingly steps out from the wings, is shot by an agent's bullet, dies on center stage...

somebody get me Weinstein on the blower

http://digital-lifestyles.info/copy_images/nokia-hf-300-lg.jpg
Nobody's gonna ask about the guy with the microphone. They're gonna say; where's Paltow, where's Affleck?

haha, JAMES CAAN.

Bingo

the other ~~gag~~ i liked was how crap dreymann's play looked in the east...and how much lamer it looked being restaged in the west

it didn't look any worse than a Lars von Trier film.

this movie is just sort of zzzzzz, not offensive

which is bad news if you, like me, have offensive taste in movies

which is why the superior Black Book is not an Oscar contender!

There was a rather interesting in-depth review of this movie by Timothy Garton Ash (who visited East Germany back in the day and has his own Stasi file) in the NY Review of Books:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20210

He finds some small historical inaccuracies and cites a few implausibilities, including Wiesler's rapid conversion:

Wiesler's own conversion, as shown to us in the film, seems implausibly rapid and not fully convincing—despite a wonderfully enigmatic performance by the East German actor Ulrich Mühe. It would take more than the odd sonata and Brecht poem to thaw the driven puritan we are shown at the beginning. I find it interesting that in a contribution to the accompanying book (which also contains the original screenplay), the film's historical adviser, Manfred Wilke, gives historical corroboration for many aspects of the film, but does not offer a single documented instance of a Stasi officer behaving in this way—and getting away with it. Instead he cites two cases of disaffected officers, a major in 1979 and a captain in 1981, both of whom were condemned to death and executed. Yet I'm prepared to accept that such a conversion and cover-up was just about within the realms of possibility. (If Colonel Grubitz had exposed Wiesler, he would have compromised himself.)

However, his main quibble is with the movie's assertion that Wiesler's actions make him a "good" man, as implied by the title of the book the playwright later writes, The Sonata of the Good Man.

Can't believe anyone liked Black Book. Speaking of ridiculous melodrama.

amazing movie, black book.

what's wrong with melodrama?

i was a little disappointed that wiesler didn't turn out to be a better writer than dreyman. there was a little window opened where he's creating scenes of his "writing sessions" on the Lenin play out of whole cloth, i really wanted his superiors to want line-by-line info on this fake play, meaning he has to be up all night writing it. that would have been great.

i totally wanted this to happen too

black book is fantastic

i like the lives of others, too. just not as much as black book.

Not so much the melodrama I objected to (I did like The Lives of Others), but the ridiculous. Everything in it was obvious, loud, foolish, overstated, and garish. The endless chain of absurd coincidences got tiring after a while, and the fact that it was clearly intentional didn't help. Some decent performances, but nothing that rang true, and nothing we haven't seen time and time again. It felt so dated and bloated, so old.

That last re: s1ocki

amazing movie, black book. what's wrong with melodrama?

though i like both films i would certainly take loud, garish, and violent over quiet and gray in this particular case. i think black book was far less obvious thematically than the lives of others, anyway.

it was loud and garish and perverse! that's kind of what's great about it!

i mean that last shot alone...

Fair enough. I just wasn't that entertained. Take one old fuddy-duddy war movie, add a big dose of nihilist situational morality and top w/ bleached pubic hair.

a recipe for FUN!

fuddy duddy? idiosyncratic characters who don't shout about milkshakes?

ok enough twbb talk >:(

you have to respond to criticism in a way that doesn't involve randomly lashing out at other movies sometimes morbs.

what's fuddy-duddy about a movie where a jewish woman falls in love with a nazi, is betrayed by anti-semitic resistance fighters, gets covered in filth and ends up on the front line of the 1948 war?

the Israel segment is set in 1956.

I just bristle at 'fuddy duddy' applied to a crisp linear story that doesn't have any absurdist catchphrase cachet, mark.

oh i agree about the fuddy-duddy thing being totally misplaced.

i mean it's got a bit of an old-fashioned vibe to it but it totally twists it.

It just didn't twist it enough for me. When I talk about fuddy-duddyness, yeah, in part I'm complaining about it being a formally straightforward WWII melodrama, but mostly I'm complaining about the level of imagination involved. The visual sensibility seemed like the product of other movies and television shows. Not in a good way, either (Robocop, Raiders of the Lost Ark). I agree that it's a subversive film, but not enough to justify the boring surfaces.

so are you saying the influences are those two films and therefore not good influences, or 'damn i wish those two films were influences?'

No, I'm saying that Robocop (another Veerhoeven flick) and Raiders of the Lost Ark are movies with a similar sort of formal imagination: everything on screen represents not the world as we know it, but the world as we've observed it in other films. Robocop and RotLA, however, actually address this indebtedness. In BB it just seemed the formal language of someone borrowing stock ideas from the work of others. Unselfconscious movie-movies can be great, but BB felt like an unimaginative pastiche of dated WWII tropes. The way things were shot were boring/familiar, the basic plot points were boring/familiar, the character types, etc., etc. The parade of things we've seen a million times was interrupted only occasionally by the jaw-dropping crassness and nihilism that are Veerhoeven's usual stock in trade. Personally, I like the crassness and nihilism, but here they seemed watered-down, along with everything else.

This thread is turning into a spoiler for the other movie, which I wanted to see but never got around to.

SPOILERS! This movie has to go through about five flash-forwards to get to a point where everybody (alive) is happy. Which was so key.

you know what is absolutely insane about this movie? it was made for TWO MILLION DOLLARS

i.e. huh??

I can't remember much action in hindsight, mostly chatting made more intense by surveillance.

No stars, sets pretty dismal aside from the theater stuff.

the production design is pretty awesome.

da croupier, two million dollars would have been considered low budget even in 1990

http://zerotosixty.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/medium_dr_evil_1.jpg

$2M pretty wasteful compared to Killer of Sheep and Eraserhead

I'm not saying its not low-budget! I'm just saying its not OMG HOW'D THEY DO THAT. And by dismal I didn't mean the set design was bad, just that it had to look like East Germany.

Donnersmarck wrote, "More than anything else, The Lives of Others is a human drama about the ability of human beings to do the right thing, no matter how far they have gone down the wrong path." Funder replied: "This is an uplifting thought. But what is more likely to save us from going down the wrong path again is recognising how human beings can be trained and forced into faceless systems of oppression, in which conscience is extinguished."

yes, all movies should clearly reflect that.

it's apparently a big theme of that hannah montana movie.

that's obviously what's being suggested.

"A movie about oppression in East Germany would be a lot more interesting if it wasn't so determined to have a feel-good ending."

"god, so what, Knocked Up should have ended with a miscarriage?!?!"

that's obviously what's being suggested.

so why did you get glib about the comment re: lives of others?

i dunno it sometimes irks me when people criticize a movie for what it's not. i mean i agree with the dude that "how human beings can be trained and forced into faceless systems of oppression, in which conscience is extinguished" should be recognized, but that doesn't rule out the other thing, you know?

because that really is what the hannah montana movie is about

xp

s1ocki OTM

i mean i'm sure i've been guilty of that as much as anybody else.

of that kind of criticism, not of training and forcing human beings into a faceless system of oppresion, in which conscience is extinguished

More than anything else, The Lives of Others is a human drama about the ability of human beings to do the right thing
"Two hands, East tattooed on the one, and West upon the other"

yeah but when "the other thing" is totally commonplace, I don't think its a crime to point out what would make a film that revolves around it more worthwhile and exceptional.

x-post I was gonna say, what critic DOESN'T do that?

totally commonplace in films about oppression, I mean. Not in the systems themselves. which is part of what makes it annoying.

doesn't do which one?

third base!

"a human drama about the ability of human beings to do the right thing, no matter how far they have gone down the wrong path"

vs.

"recognising how human beings can be trained and forced into faceless systems of oppression, in which conscience is extinguished."

You know what? Those are both boring, "commonplace" themes. Neither one has a leg up in the interestingness sweepstakes, though the first obviously sells better.

I hate to do this (again), but how is the humanization of the Stazi creep in this movie any more troubling or unbelievable than the humanization of the SS officer in Black Book? People keep harping on it WRT The Lives of Others, but the other film gets a pass. Why? Why is it so important that this film teach a specific lesson?

the SS officer is "humanized," the Stasi creep is sanctified.

because it's specifically about faceless systems of oppression and what sorts of things can "humanize" or save individuals who are trapped in it

black book isn't really about that, at least not so specifically

Black Book wasn't ABOUT humanizing a creep, though. That aspect was only part of how the lead character's world was muddied and conflicted. In The Lives Of Others it was the feel-good outcome. And its not important that films teach a lesson, just that evoking how oppressive systems work would be more interesting (feel free to disagree or give examples of Oscar winning films that do this) than another film about how light always shines through.

i'm trying to think of movies i like that do that.

cuz i agree it is more interesting. but how can it be made cinematic without feeling completely tendentious?

that's part of why somebody pulling it off would truly deserve commendation.

suuuuuuure. if someone could make a movie that truly dramatized the fragile complexity of the human condition in a brilliant way, that person would deserve accolades too.

did Brazil win any Oscars? Nothing major.

Of course Oscar-winning films skew toward a light shining through, hence J Hoberman's razz about Schindler's List and not having to worry about eating after cuz it's a feelgood Holocaust movie. (sic)

slocki, the only point I can see to you mockingly blowing up wishful sentiments about cinema to ludicrous extremes is to suggest its ridiculous to hope (and save our extreme praise) for films that are actually exceptional.

Some folks seem to think this film should have concentrated not on the fall of totalitarianism, but on the mechanisms by which it can triumph. Why? I still don't see how that's a superior theme.

The Lives of Others is a movie about the fall of Soviet communism in Eastern Europe, specifically in East Germany. On a certain level, Weisler represents the way art helped crack the wall from within. And, sure, that's kind of trite, but it's not bullshit, and it's not a story that's often been told.

Agree that Black Book had a different theme, but I was talking more about the critics who say that it's would have been flat-out impossible for a Stasi officer to think & feel the way Weisler apparently did. Nobody ever says that about SS officers. They've often received sympathetic treatement in films, and were just as rigorously trained and ruthless - if not more so.

encompassing the texture of life under huge oppressive systems is a bit much for a 2 hour film

xp yeah but the lives of others isn't really 'about' the fall of communism -- there's nothing dramatized about how that happened or why, it cuts right over it!

Don't think films have to be Oscar-winners to be meaningfully compared to this one. There are lots of downbeat films out there about totalitarianism.

I was talking more about the critics who say that it's would have been flat-out impossible for a Stasi officer to think & feel the way Weisler apparently did.

You do know Weisler is a fictional character, right?

Maybe it's just me, but I saw the lives of others as a metaphor for the fall of communism. The disenchantment with the results vs. the promises, the squalor and corruption, and the evidence of something better as provided by art.

Yah, I know he's fictional. That sentence probably should have read, "think & feel the way Weisler is depicted as thinking & feeling." Maybe you can get a mod to fix it.

But what is more likely to save us from going down the wrong path again is recognising how human beings can be trained and forced into faceless systems of oppression, in which conscience is extinguished.

lol watch hbo shows

croupier i guess my point is that it's easy to praise something hypothetical... which is why this kind of crit gets on my nerves.

personally i thought it was kind of cheap to show weisler getting it on with a fat, old prostitute; maybe he would never have turned if he'd had access to the a-list?

Is the objection here that The Lives of Others is cheezeball? The ending too unreservedly (undeservedly) upbeat, the puppy-dog Stasi officer too sentimentally deified?

Okay, I can see that, but a lot of the other objections sound misplaced.

Fat prostitute was a really nice gal.

Totalitarian regimes: Want to hold onto your empire? Keep your shock troops satisfied with only the most top-notch booty

of course its easy to praise the hypothetical, slocki! No reason for us to make it harder on ourselves and pretend that what we're getting is as good as it could be (unless we're getting paid too, which I'm not yet).

without financial compensation there's no reason to claim satisfaction with the current cinematic output

the other thing is you kind of need a character to change in some way to make a drama that's effective at all. i guess you could dramatize nice guy into faceless bad guy. maybe that would be more interesting. but if you start with him as a soulless agent of totalitarianism there isn't really any way to go but up.

its not important that films teach a lesson, just that evoking how oppressive systems work would be more interesting (feel free to disagree or give examples of Oscar winning films that do this) than another film about how light always shines through.

It's a documentary, but The Sorrow & the Pity does this, to a degree. And Black Book does a good job of showing how totalitarian systems need double-crosses, whores, and champagne to work (for a while).

without financial compensation there's no reason to claim satisfaction with the current cinematic output

-- da croupier, Thursday, February 14, 2008 4:53 PM (44 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

?

i guess you could dramatize nice guy into faceless bad guy

that's why i brought up hbo!! not that i've actually seen the wire yet. but my gut reaction is that this happens more often on television.

i'm just saying that one shouldn't pretend they can't imagine movies better than what they're getting out of principle alone, slocki.

like when some critics talk about how if you HAVE to see a movie this week, then see movie x. As if anyone other than someone getting paid to see movies every week HAS to.

i only ever see critics say 'if you ONLY see 1 movie this week/month/decade"

those imdb sum-ups often have some hack saying "its the best thing out this week" about some modest romcom or whatever

ah ok

speaking of oppressive systems and faceless bad guys: the critics seem to like "definitely maybe"!!

It's the best romcom since Annie Hall, apparently!!!

And that's a lotta romcoms.

it's the princess bride meets when harry met sally.

not a big ryan reynolds fan myself.

The Third Man would have been in the running if only they had kept the original ending where Joseph Cotten goes off with Alida Valli.

for best romcom?

I love that the "ryan reynolds: more than wilder!" article in ew actually had him holding his chin and looking to the side thoughtfully.

i loved his cameo in harold & kumar but worry about all this heavy lifting

more than VAN wilder, in case you thought they meant gene.

And it turns out the hotel porter wasn't really dead, he just got a little carried away playing hide and seek with his kid!

for best romcom?
yes

more like the third wheel.

Last shot is the ghost of Harry Lime smiling down on them from the top of the Prater Riesenrad.

That's the Vienna Big Wheel to you.

this thread has that problem where only your serious movie motherfuckers went and saw it.

I went and saw it.

ok well it also has that problem then.

well i tried to get a discussion started about east german prostitutes but nobody went there with me

well the one in this film isn't going anywhere good before the wall comes down but as far as that's concerned we could just as well as be talking about that clooney/soderbergh noir number

and you know not to holla but I couldn't give a shit less for a minute about how the "stasi creep" is "sanctified" or whatever, lots of antiheros have gotten by with much much more in the way of redemption for a lot less sand

i think part of it is that most brits and americans know jack shit about east germany and so this film functions as a de facto history lesson whether it likes it or not; it fails in this regard i think, but it's not fair to look at it only from that pov

my biggest complaint: no musical numbers

which is where "top secret" really pulls away from the pack

this movie really needed Omar Sharif.

And Hildegard Knef.

most brits and americans know jack shit about east germany and so this film functions as a de facto history lesson

right, and I think it's especially cheeky to complain about the treatment of the protagonist here when like 2/3rds of the entire anglophone cinematic tradition is about those colorful rapey blood-soaked sociopaths who built our respective countries into what they are today, america esp. with all them westerns (also I finally watched gangs of ny lol)

i complain about those too!

though the usual western trope is the exact reverse, right? the law-abiding man of peace who circumstances force to become a killer in order to protect his family/town/etc

"You are a good-looking boy. You have big, broad shoulders. But he is a man. And it takes more than big, broad shoulders to make a man."

right, and I think it's especially cheeky to complain about the treatment of the protagonist here when like 2/3rds of the entire anglophone cinematic tradition is about those colorful rapey blood-soaked sociopaths who built our respective countries into what they are today, america esp. with all them westerns (also I finally watched gangs of ny lol)

what the fuck does this have to with the fact that the protagonist's evolution into a Rilke-loving quasi-softie is convincing?

I saw it. I liked it, though I had a little more trouble with the believability of Dreyman, rather than Wiesler.

fukk all y'all i CRIED REAL TEARS at the end of this

so this is showing on the big screen here soon - worth seeing? didn't want to go through the thread for fear of spoilers. should be noted I'm not a big fan of calculated shmaltz (I did cry in theaters during A.I. though)

it's pretty good, looks really nice, and obv the historical setting is fascinating. but maybe leave 10 mins before the end if you don't like schmaltz :)

haha - not sure how the people I would be seeing it with would take it. I'll tell them I need to make some stock trades

yes it's good. leave when they stop steaming envelopes because maybe you are allergic to envelopes.

i liked this a lot, saw it in the cinema and really loved it until the end, which is pretty shit. But apart from that enjoyable.